must have, as its primal and essential units, self-contained groups of not more than 150 students segregated in their own residential quad, with its common-room, refectory and chapel, and with a certain number of faculty members in residence, the whole being united under one “head.”  There may be perhaps no reason why, granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an “university” with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social “unions” as large as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies.  A college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and as a mob it ought to be put down.

I said at the outset of this lecture that we could not lay the present failure of civilization to the doors of education, however great its shortcomings, for the causes lay deeper than this.  I maintain that this is true; and yet formal education can not escape scatheless, for it has failed to admit this decline while acknowledging the claim set up for it that it could and would achieve this end.  Certainly it will incur a heavy responsibility if it does not at once recognize the fact that while it can not do the half that has been claimed for it, it can do far more than it is doing now, and that in a very large degree the future does depend for its honour or its degradation on the part formal education is to perform at the present crisis.  To do this it must execute a volte face and confess that it can only develop inherent potential, not create capacity, and that the primary object of its activities must be not the stall-feeding of intellect and the practical preparation for a business career, but the fostering and the building up of the personal character that denotes the Christian gentleman.  I do not think that I can do better for a conclusion than to quote from the “Philosophy of Education” by the late Dr. Thomas Edward Shields.

“The unchanging aim of Christian education is, and always has been, to put the pupil into possession of a body of truth derived from nature and from Divine Revelation, from the concrete work of man’s hand and from the content of human speech, in order to bring his conduct into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the civilization of his day.

“Christian education, therefore, aims at transforming native instincts while preserving and enlarging their powers.  It aims at bringing the flesh under the control of the spirit.  It draws upon the experience and the wisdom of the race, upon Divine Revelation and upon the power of Divine grace, in order that it may bring the conduct of the individual into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the civilization of the day.  It aims at the development of the whole man, at the preservation of unity and continuity in his conscious life; it aims at transforming man’s native egotism to altruism; at developing the social side of his nature to such an extent that he may regard all men as his brothers; sharing with them the common Fatherhood of God.  In one word, it aims at transforming a child of the flesh into a child of God.”